[legal-discuss] Need for "All rights reserved" in source files ?

Richard Fontana rfontana at redhat.com
Tue May 27 14:06:56 UTC 2014


On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 01:47:58PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> Is there any current legal reason why 'All rights reserved' is needed in
> source files ? 

None that I can see.

> So I'm wondering if there is any legal reason that prevents us removing
> the 'All rights reserved' statements from the source files in Nova, and
> any projects who wish to do a similar cleanup ?

tl;dr IMO you should keep the 'All rights reserved' unless the nominal
copyright holders in the associated legal notice authorize the removal.

If the code with which such notices are associated were licensed by
the nominal copyright holder under the Apache License 2.0, section 4c
of the Apache License 2.0 would suggest that the license requires
retention of the full legal notice, as it says:

  You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You
  distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution
  notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices
  that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works

I would assume the "All rights reserved", however pointless, to be
part of the copyright notice for purposes of this provision.

That raises the question of what entity or entities are actually
granting the Apache License. This has been a point of confusion. See
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/OpenStackAndItsCLA#Duplicative_Licensing
for some discussion of one aspect of this. In any case, direct Apache
License grants from non-OpenStack-Foundation entities must be
occurring where there are cracks in the CLA system, and it's
*possible* that in a subset of these cases you have copyright notices
with "All rights reserved" associated with the material covered by
those license grants. 

I only raise this point because I can't say that the mere existence of
the CLA system itself provides a basis for the removal of all the 'All
rights reserved' statements any more than it authorizes the removal of
the main copyright notices. In a more typical CLA system you wouldn't
have copyright notices from contributors other than the OpenStack
Foundation itself.

There are also OpenStack Foundation copyright notices in source code
with "All rights reserved" appended. Here's a possible example, though
it's a case where you have more than one nominal copyright holder:
https://github.com/openstack/python-keystoneclient/blob/master/keystoneclient/v2_0/roles.py

In this sort of case it's even clearer to me that the 'All rights
reserved' has to be retained unless the OpenStack Foundation instructs
otherwise, since clearly the OpenStack Foundation is granting licenses
under the Apache License.

(It's been noted that some OpenStack Foundation copyright notices
appear to have been included in error. See:
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/LegalIssuesFAQ#Copyright_Headers )

There appear to be some Red Hat copyright notices with 'All rights
reserved' in OpenStack source files. Red Hat developers: don't use
'All rights reserved'. :) These can be deleted if there is no other
named copyright holder.

 - RF




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